How fast are raptors?

Soldato
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How much faster are raptors over standard drives? I was thinking that newer large capacity drives are just as fast? I'm looking at the 74gb 16mb drive, would I notice it any faster playing games and opening programs?
 
I went from 2x raptors in Raid0 to a single WD640blue

I noticed the difference in speed (drop), but I just use sleep mode now anyway, the 640 is plenty fast at loading games for my uses

When raptors first came out, they totally blew all other drives out of the water, now the margin between them and regular hard drives isn't as noticeable, in my opinion
 
I wanted my first P4 rig to have raptor(s) as they were so coveted in the modding community. Seems that's pretty much gone now esp with the advent of SSD's pulling punches above their weight
 
Yeh I looked into SSDs, but for me, they are far to expensive, don't have that sort of monies so was looking into Raptors.

Other than HDtach, which I don't really understand the graph, is there like something that shows how many seconds things take?

I cant quite get a grasp on how much of an improvement they would be.
 
Yeh I looked into SSDs, but for me, they are far to expensive, don't have that sort of monies so was looking into Raptors.

Other than HDtach, which I don't really understand the graph, is there like something that shows how many seconds things take?

I cant quite get a grasp on how much of an improvement they would be.

I can hear my mates ide drive hammering away when it runs a virus scan. It takes ages for him to extract things. My old ide drive used to take minutes to extract a 200mb RAR file, almost as long as it did to download it. My Velociraptor extracts 200mb RAR files in about 10 or 20 seconds
 
VelociRaptors are about 30% faster than the old Raptors. While the newer high capacity drives now have them beat in sequential read / write they have better random read / write and wipe the floor with 7200 rpm drives in terms of access time because of the higher rotational speed. They are good drives for OS / apps / games.

Having said that, an SSD definately offers far superior performance. I used to have a pair of Raptors in RAID0 but replaced them with SSDs (non-RAID). Still use a VelociRaptor though and don't think I'll be dumping it anytime soon. Very fast, quiet drive.
 
Sorry to ask so many questions, but, to see the benefits of (veloci)raptors, do you have to run them in Raid 0?
 
Ok, I think I have found what I want. You know how like when you pick a GFX card, you can judge them on FPS. IS there a benchmark for HDDs for transfering say a 4gb file around or something?

I want to decide if the extra money is going to give say a third quicker or somethign so I can decide value for money etc. :D


Thanks guys!
 
i have two old raptors and in raid 0 they are about as fast as the new 7,200rpm hard disks. ssd drives are a better option than 10-15,000rpm disks
 
You can run synthetic bechmarks on a HDD / SSD. Programs such as HD Tune HD Tach, AS SSD Benchmark, EVEREST, etc, etc will do this. Note though that these often don't reflect real word use. Tom's Hardware has some nice charts you can look at for numbers that equate more with real life use and you can also compare drives.

For example my own two HDDs are compared in-depth below...

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/chart...compare,1010.html?prod[3016]=on&prod[2367]=on

Which drive you should choose depends very much on what you intend to use it for. I was running the OS for a time on the VelociRaptor and it performed very well. When looking for a storage / backup drive the Samsung F3 was an obvious choice and its value / high sequential performance was an advantage.

Not sure what you mean about requiring RAID for benefits? If you stick any pair of drives in RAID0 you will see a big performance boost. Do you need RAID? Depends again on your needs and your budget but these days an SSD would be a better choice for the same money. Raptors / VelociRaptors in RAID can match SSD sequential speeds but don't even come close to the access times.

You'll probably have to aquire Raptors second hand now as they are discontinued but the 150 GB VelociRaptors have come down in price a bit and OCUK had (or still has?) an offer of £100 which is a bargain. Also don't expect games to run significantly faster as you mentioned in your OP. Loading times will be slightly quicker and a few titles do stream world data but even so we are talking low single figure FPS increases at best.

My advice is to go SSD but if out of your budget let us know more details about what drives you already have in your current system. That way we can offer better advice on what type of additional drive would be most suitable. For OS (+apps) my personal choice would be a VelociRaptor and a fast high capacity drive for pretty much everything else, unless you have some specialised requirements.
 
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Wow, thanks for putting the time in.
At the moment I have A Sammy F3 and a 7200.11 I think also have another drive WD green I beleive.

So in total 500 + 500 + 1tb.
This new one would be only for my OS + Gaming + Apps partition as I have storage elsewhere.

Only reason I have been thinking about it is due to BF:BC taking an eternity to load all the textures between maps, and consequently, by the time I get in, people are already half way across the map.
 
Well you have a ton of space. You might consider games on the F3, the other two for storage, and a VR or SSD for the OS / apps. Moving the games to a second drive can boost performance a little and really help to stay on top of fragmentation.
 
It's not a bad idea as such but if you have multiple drives it makes sense to split them. Games will fragment the crap out of your OS drive and you may even see small peformance gain since the OS can access the system and game files separately.

Also thought that since you have the slow WD Green you could use that to image the OS and / or backup the Seagate if you use it for storage.
 
OK so you guys have convinced me to look at SSDs a bit more, so I read the sticky, how comes the prices have gone up so much since it was written?

e.g.
So basically either get the 64/128/256gb Crucial M225 ssd's for £103/200/363

But the prices on OcUK are:

140.99/282/499

Are prices on these cyclical like on the run up to Xmas, big manufacturers buy up RAM and so prices go up, and then after Xmas they fall again?

Whats the dealio? Have I missed the boat? :)
 
Just a quick update, I bought a Crucial M225 64gb :)

£140 delivered next day, I love internet bargain hunting, Boooyah!

Will velcro it inside my Floppy drive on the Antec P182, with a nice fresh install of Win7.
 
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I hear good things about the Crucials. I think you'll be very impressed with SSD performance. That should read floppy drive bay of course. I have this horrible vision of you trying to shoehorn that nice and expensive SSD into the drive itself! :D
 
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